1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for assessing vascular health and for assessing the effects of treatments, risk factors and substances, including therapeutic substances, on blood vessels, especially cerebral blood vessels, all achieved by measuring various parameters of blood flow in one or more vessels and analyzing the results in a defined matter. In addition, the present invention further pertains to collecting, analyzing, and using the measurement of various parameters of blood flow in one or more vessels to establish protocols for and to monitor clinical trials. Further, the present invention relates to an automated decision support system for interpreting the values of various parameters of blood flow in one or more vessels in assessing the vascular health of an individual.
2. Background Information
Proper functioning of the vascular system is essential for the health and fitness of living organisms. The vascular system carries essential nutrients and blood gases to all living tissues and removes waste products for excretion. The vasculature is divided into different regions depending on the organ systems served. If vessels feeding a specific organ or group of organs are compromised, the organs and tissues supplied by those vessels are deleteriously affected and may even fail completely.
Vessels, especially various types of arteries, not only transmit fluid to various locations, but are also active in responding to pressure changes during the cardiac cycle. With each contraction of the left ventricle of the heart during systole, blood is pumped through the aorta and then distributed throughout the body. Many arteries contain elastic membranes in their walls which assist in expansion of the vessel during systole. These elastic membranes also function in smoothing pulsatile blood flow throughout the vascular system. The vessel walls of such arteries often rebound following passage of the systolic pressure waveform.
In auto-regulation, cerebral blood vessels maintain constant cerebral blood flow by either constricting or dilating over a certain mean arterial blood pressure range so that constant oxygen delivery is maintained to the brain. Vascular failure occurs when the pressure drops too low and the velocity starts to fall. If the blood pressure gets too high and the vessels can no longer constrict to limit flow, then breakthrough, hyperemia breakthrough, and loss of auto-regulation occur. Both of these conditions are pathologic states, and have been described in the literature in terms of mean arterial pressure and cerebral blood flow velocity. But there are outliers that could not be explained based on that model. The failure of the model is that it relies upon systemic blood pressure; the pressure of blood in the brain itself is not being measured directly. The resultant pressure curve has an S-shaped curve.
The force applied to the blood from each heart beat is what drives it forward. In physics, force is equivalent to mass times acceleration. But when blood is examined on a beat to beat variation, each heartbeat delivers about the same mass of blood, unless there is severe loss of blood or a very irregular heart rhythm. Therefore, as a first approximation, the force of flow on the blood at that particular moment is directly proportional to its acceleration.
Diseased blood vessels lose the ability to stretch. The elasticity or stretch of the blood vessel is very critical to maintaining pulsatile flow. When a muscle is stretched, it is not a passive relaxation. There is a chemical reaction that happens within the muscle itself that causes a micro-contracture to increase the constriction, so that when a bolus of blood comes through with each heartbeat, it stretches the blood vessel wall, but the blood vessel then contracts back and gives the kick forward to maintain flow over such a large surface area with the relatively small organ of the heart. This generates a ripple of waves, starting in the large vessel of the aorta and working its way through the rest of the vessels. As vessels become diseased, they lose the ability to maintain this type of pulsatile flow.
Further, if vessels are compromised due to various factors such as narrowing or stenosis of the vessel lumen, blood flow becomes abnormal. If narrowing of a vessel is extensive, turbulent flow may occur at the stenosis resulting in damage to the vessel. In addition, blood may not flow adequately past the point of stenosis, thereby injuring tissues distal to the stenosis. While such vascular injuries may occur anywhere throughout the body, the coronary and cerebral vascular beds are of supreme importance for survival and well-being of the organism. Narrowing of the coronary vessels supplying the heart may decrease cardiovascular function and decrease blood flow to the myocardium, leading to a heart attack. Such episodes may result in significant reduction in cardiac function and death.
Abnormalities in the cerebral vessels may prevent adequate blood flow to neural tissue, resulting in transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), migraines and stroke. The blood vessels which supply the brain are derived from the internal carotid arteries and the vertebral arteries. These vessels and their branches anastomose through the great arterial circle, also known as the Circle of Willis. From this circle arise the anterior, middle and posterior cerebral arteries. Other arteries such as the anterior communicating artery and the posterior communicating artery provide routes of collateral flow through the great arterial circle. The vertebral arteries join to form the basilar artery, which itself supplies arterial branches to the cerebellum, brain stem and other brain regions. A blockage of blood flow within the anterior cerebral artery, the posterior cerebral artery, the middle cerebral artery, or any of the other arteries distal to the great arterior circle results in compromised blood flow to the neural tissue supplied by that artery. Since neural tissue cannot survive without normal, constant levels of glucose and oxygen within the blood and provided to neurons by glial cells, blockage of blood flow in any of these vessels leads to death of the nervous tissue supplied by that vessel.
Strokes result from blockage of blood flow in cerebral vessels due to constriction of the vessel resulting from an embolus or stenosis. Strokes may also arise from tearing of the vessel wall due to any number of circumstances. Accordingly, a blockage may result in ischemic stroke depriving neural tissue distal to the blockage of oxygen and glucose. A tearing or rupture of the vessel may result in bleeding into the brain, also known as a hemorrhagic stroke. Intracranial bleeding exerts deleterious effects on surrounding tissue due to increased intracranial pressure and direct exposure of neurons to blood.
Regardless of the cause, stroke is a major cause of illness and death. Stroke is the leading cause of death in women and kills more women than breast cancer. Currently, more than three quarters of a million people in the United States experience a stroke each year, and more than 25 percent of these individuals die. Approximately one-third of individuals suffering their first stroke die within the following year. Furthermore, about one-third of all survivors of a first stroke experience additional strokes within the next three years.
In addition to its terminal aspect, stroke is a leading cause of disability in the adult population. Such disability can lead to permanent impairment and decreased function in any part of the body. Paralysis of various muscle groups innervated by neurons affected by the stroke can lead to confinement to a wheel chair, and muscular spasticity and rigidity. Strokes leave many patients with no ability to communicate either orally or by written means. Often, stroke patients are unable to think clearly and have difficulties naming objects, interacting with other individuals, and generally operating in society.
Strokes also result in massive expenditures of resources throughout society, and place a tremendous economic burden on affected individuals and their families. It is estimated that the annual total costs in the United States economy alone is over $30 billion per year, with the average acute care stroke treatment costing approximately $35,000. As the population increases in age, the incidence of stroke will rise dramatically. In fact, the risk of stroke doubles with ever succeeding decade of life. Since the life expectancy of the population has increased dramatically during the last 100 years, the number of individuals over 50 years old has risen precipitously. In this population of individuals living to ages never before expected, the potential for stroke is very high indeed. Accordingly, the financial and emotional impact of cerebral vascular damage is expected to dramatically increase during the next several decades.
Despite the tremendous risk of stroke, there are presently no convenient and accurate methods to access vascular health. Many methods rely on invasive procedures, such as arteriograms, to determine whether vascular stenosis is occurring. These invasive techniques are often not ordered until the patient becomes symptomatic. For example, carotid arteriograms may be ordered following a physical examination pursuant to the appearance of a clinical symptom. Performing an arteriogram is not without risks due to introducing dye materials into the vascular system that may cause allergic responses. Arteriograms also use catheters that can damage the vascular wall and dislodge intraluminal plaque, which can cause an embolic stroke at a downstream site.
Many methods and devices available for imaging cerebral vessels do not provide a dynamic assessment of vascular health. Instead, these imaging procedures and equipment merely provide a snapshot or static image of a vessel at a particular point in time. Cerebral angiography is conventionally held to be the “gold standard” of analyzing blood flow to the brain. But this invasive method of analysis only provides the shape of the vessels in an imaging modality. To obtain the same type of flow criteria from an angiogram as one obtains from the present invention would entail extraordinary efforts and multiple dangerous procedures.
Instruments have been developed to obtain noninvasive measurements of blood velocity in anterior arteries and veins using Doppler principles. In accordance with known Doppler phenomenon, these instruments provide an observer in motion relative to a wave source a wave from the source that has a frequency different from the frequency of the wave at the source. If the source is moving toward the observer, a higher frequency wave is received by the observer. Conversely, if the wave source is moving away from the observer, a lower frequency wave is received. The difference between the emitted and received frequencies is known as the Doppler shift. This Doppler technique may be accomplished through the use of ultrasound energy.
The operation of such instruments in accordance with the Doppler principle may be illustrated with respect to FIGS. 1 to 4. In FIG. 1, the ultrasound probe 40 acts as a stationary wave source, emitting pulsed ultrasound at a frequency of, e.g., 2 MHz. This ultrasound is transmitted through the skull 41 and brain parenchyma to a blood vessel 42. For purposes of illustration, a blood cell 43 is shown moving toward the probe and acts as a moving observer. As illustrated in FIG. 2, the blood cell reflects the pulse of ultrasound and can be considered a moving wave source. The probe receives this reflected ultrasound, acting as a stationary observer. The frequency of the ultrasound received by the probe, f1 is higher than the frequency, f0, originally emitted. The Doppler shift of the received wave can then be calculated. FIGS. 3 and 4 show the effect on a pulse of ultrasound when blood flows in a direction away from the probe. In this case, the received frequency, f2, reflected from the blood cell, is lower than the emitted frequency f0. Again, the Doppler shift can be calculated.
The Doppler effect can be used to determine the velocity of blood flow in the cerebral arteries. For this purpose, the Doppler equation used is the following:
      F    d    =            2      ⁢                          ⁢              F        t            ⁢                          ⁢      V      ⁢                          ⁢      cos      ⁢                          ⁢      Θ              V      o                      where        Fd=Doppler frequency shift        Ft=Frequency of the transmitter        V=Velocity of blood flow        Θ=Angle of incidence between the probe and the artery        V0=Velocity of ultrasound in body tissue        
Typically, Ft is a constant, e.g., 2, 4 or 8 MHz, and V0 is approximately 1540 meters second (m/s) in soft body tissue. Assuming that there is a zero angle of incidence between the probe and the artery, the value of cos Θ is equal to 1. The effect of the angle Θ is only significant for angles of incidence exceeding 30°.
In exemplary instruments, ultrasonic energy is provided in bursts at a pulse repetition rate or frequency. The probe receives the echoes from each burst and converts the sound energy to an electrical signal. To obtain signal data corresponding to reflections occurring at a specific depth (range) within the head, an electronic gate opens to receive the reflected signal at a selected time after the excitation pulse, corresponding to the expected time of arrival of an echo from a position at the selected depth. The range resolution is generally limited by the bandwidth of the various components of the instrument and the length of the burst. The bandwidth can be reduced by filtering the received signal, but at the cost of an increased length of sample volume.
Other body movements, for example, vessel wall contractions, can also scatter ultrasound, which will be detected as “noise” in the Doppler signal. To reduce this noise interference, a high pass filter is used to reduce the low frequency, high amplitude signals. The high pass filter typically can be adjusted to have a passband above a cutoff frequency selectable between, e.g., about 0 and about 488 Hz.
Many health care providers rarely have such flow diagnostic capabilities at their disposal. For example, health care providers may be situated in remote locations such as in rural areas, on the ocean or in a battlefield situation. These health care providers need access to analytical capabilities for analysis of flow data generated at the remote location. Health care providers facing these geographic impediments are limited in their ability to provide the high quality medical services needed for their patients, especially on an emergency basis. Further, both physicians and individuals concerned for their own health are often limited in their ability to consult with specialists in specific medical disciplines. Accordingly, a system that facilitates access of physicians in various locations to sophisticated medical diagnostic and prognostic capabilities concerning vascular health is needed. Such access would promote delivery of higher quality health care to individuals located throughout the country, especially in remote areas removed from major medical centers.
There is also a need for a system whereby patient vascular data can be transmitted to a central receiving facility, which receives the data, analyzes it, produces a value indicative of the state of vascular health, and then transmit this information to another location, such as the originating data transmitting station, or perhaps directly to the health care provider's office. This system should provide access to sophisticated computing capabilities that would enhance the accuracy of health care providers' diagnostic and prognostic capabilities concerning vascular health. This system should be able to receive high volumes of patient data and rapidly process the data in order to obtain diagnoses and prognoses of disease. Such a system could be used for diagnosis and prognosis of any disease or condition related to vascular health.
There is a further need for a system that facilitates the ability of a health care provider to conveniently and rapidly transmit vascular flow data parameters obtained from a patient to a location where consistent, reproducible analysis is performed. The results of the analysis can then be transmitted to the health care provider to facilitate accurate diagnosis or prognosis of a patient, to recommend treatment options, and to discuss the ramifications of those treatment options with the patient.
There is also a need for a system that enables health care providers to measure the rate and type of developing vascular disease, and to recommend interventions that prevent, minimize, stabilize or reverse the disease.
There is a further need for a system that enables health care providers to predict the vascular reaction to a proposed therapeutic intervention, and to modify the proposed therapeutic intervention if a deleterious or adverse vascular response is anticipated. Physicians often prescribe therapeutic substances for patients with conditions related to the cardiovascular system that may affect vascular health. For example, hypertensive patients may be prescribed beta-blockers with the intent of lowering blood pressure, thereby decreasing the probability of a heart attack. Patients frequently receive more than one therapeutic substance for their condition or conditions. The potential interaction of therapeutic substances at a variety of biological targets, such as blood vessels, is often poorly understood. Therefore, a non-invasive method that can be used to assess the vascular effects of a substance, such as a therapeutic substance, or a combination of therapeutic substances is needed. A clear understanding of the vascular effects of one or more substances on blood vessels may prevent prescriptions of substances with undesirable and potentially lethal effects, such as stroke, vasospasm and heart attack. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method that can be used for repeated assessment without deleterious effects of potential vascular effects of a substance, or combination of substances, in a patient population during a clinical trial. Such clinical studies may also reveal dosages of individual substances and combinations of substances at specific dosages that provide desirable and unexpected effects on blood vessels.
Furthermore, a system and method that can provide an assessment of the vascular health of an individual is needed. Also needed is a system and method that may be used routinely to assess vascular health, such as during periodic physical examinations. This system and method preferably is non-invasive and provides information concerning the compliance and elasticity of a vessel. Also needed is a system and method that may be used to rapidly assess the vascular health of an individual. Such systems and methods should be available for use in routine physical examinations, and especially in the emergency room, intensive care unit or in neurological clinic. What is also needed is a system and method which can be applied in a longitudinal manner for each individual so that the vascular health of the individual may be assessed over time. In this manner, a problem or a disease process may be detected before the appearance of a major cerebral vascular accident or stroke.
In addition, there is a need for a system and method for assessing whether treatments, risk factors and substances affect blood vessels, particularly cerebral blood vessels, so that their potential for causing vascular responses may be determined. By determining the vascular effects of treatments, risk factors and substances, physicians may recommend that a patient avoid the treatment, risk factor and/or substance. Alternatively, desirable vascular effects of a treatment, therapeutic intervention and/or substance may result in administration of the treatment, therapeutic intervention and/or substance to obtain a desired effect.
In addition, there is also needed a system and method for assessing the efficacy of a treatment, including conducting a procedure, carrying out a therapy, and administering a pharmaceutical substance, in treating vascular disorders, so that identification of those treatments most efficacious in the treatment of vascular disorders can be determined and employed to restore vascular health.
As required by federal regulations, treatments, including drugs and other therapies intended for treating individuals, have to be tested in people. These tests, called clinical trials, provide a variety of information regarding the efficacy of treatment, such as whether it is safe and effective, at what doses it works best, and what side effects it causes. This information guides health professionals and, for nonprescription drugs, consumers in the proper use of medicines. In controlled clinical trials, results observed in patients being administered a treatment are compared to results from similar patients receiving a different treatment such as a placebo or no treatment at all. Controlled clinical trials are the only legal basis for the United States Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) in determining that a new treatment provides “substantial evidence of effectiveness, as well as confirmation of relative safety in terms of the risk-to-benefit ratio for the disease that is to be treated.”
It is important to test drugs, therapies, and procedures in those individuals that the treatments are intended to help. It is also important to design clinical studies that ask and answer the right questions about investigational treatment. Before clinical testing is initiated, researchers analyze a treatment's main physical and chemical properties in the laboratory and study its pharmacological and toxic effects on laboratory animals. If the results from the laboratory research and animal studies show promise, the treatment sponsor can apply to the FDA to begin testing in people. Once the FDA has reviewed the sponsor's plans and a local institutional review board—typically a panel of scientists, ethicists, and nonscientists that oversees clinical research at medical centers—approves the protocol for clinical trials, clinical investigators give the treatment to a small number of healthy volunteers or patients. These Phase 1 studies assess the most common acute adverse effects and examine the size of doses that patients can take safely without a high incidence of side effects. Initial clinical studies also begin to clarify what happens to a drug in the human body, e.g., whether it's changed, how much of it is absorbed into the bloodstream and various organs, how long it is retained within the body, how the body rids the drug, and the effect(s) of the drug on the body.
If Phase 1 studies do not reveal serious problems, such as unacceptable toxicity, a clinical study is then conducted wherein the treatment is given to patients who have the condition that the treatment is intended to treat. Researchers then assess whether the treatment has a favorable effect on the condition. The process for the clinical study simply requires recruiting one or more groups of patients to participate in a clinical trial, administering the treatment to those who agree to participate, and determining whether the treatment helps them.
Treatments usually do not miraculously reverse fatal illnesses. More often, they reduce the risk of death but do not entirely eliminate it. This is typically accomplished by relieving one or more symptoms of the illness, such as nasal stuffiness, pain, or anxiety. A treatment may also alter a clinical measurement in a way that physicians consider to be valuable, for example, reduce blood pressure or lower cholesterol. Such treatment effects can be difficult to detect and evaluate. This is mainly because diseases do not follow a predictable path. For example, many acute illnesses or conditions, such as viral ailments like influenza, minor injuries, and insomnia, go away spontaneously without treatment. Some chronic conditions like arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or asthma often follow a varying course, e.g., better for a time, then worse, then better again, usually for no apparent reason. Heart attacks and strokes have widely variable death rates depending on treatment, age, and other risk factors, making the “expected” mortality for an individual patient hard to predict.
A further difficulty in gauging the effectiveness of an investigational treatment is that in some cases, measurements of disease are subjective, relying on interpretation by the physician or patient. In those circumstances, it's difficult to tell whether treatment is having a favorable effect, no effect, or even an adverse effect. The way to answer critical questions about an investigational treatment is to subject it to a controlled clinical trial.
In a controlled trial, patients in one group receive the investigational treatment. Those in a comparable group, the control group, receives either no treatment at all, a placebo (an inactive substance that looks like the investigational drug), or a treatment known to be effective. The test and control groups are typically studied at the same time. Usually, the same group of patients is divided into two sub-groups, with each subgroup receiving a different treatment.
In some special cases, a study uses a “historical control,” in which patients given the investigational treatment are compared with similar patients treated with the control treatment at a different time and place. Often, patients are examined for a period of time after treatment with an investigational treatment, with the investigators comparing the patients' status both before and after treatment. Here, too, the comparison is historical and based on an estimate of what would have happened without treatment. The historical control design is particularly useful when the disease being treated has high and predictable death or illness rates. It is important that treatment and control groups be as similar as possible in characteristics that can affect treatment outcomes. For example, all patients in a specific group must have the disease the treatment is meant to treat or the same stage of the disease. Treatment and control groups should also be of similar age, weight, and general health status, and similar in other characteristics that could affect the outcome of the study, such as other treatment(s) being received at the same time.
A principal technique used in controlled trials is called “randomization.” Patients are randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group rather than deliberately selected for one group or the other. An important assumption, albeit a seriously flawed one, is that when the study population is large enough and the criteria for participation are carefully defined, randomization yields treatment and control groups that are similar in important characteristics. Because assignment to one group or another is not under the control of the investigator, randomization also eliminates the possibility of “selection bias,” the tendency to pick healthier patients to get the new treatment or a placebo. In a double-blind study, neither the patients, the investigators, nor the data analysts know which patients got the investigational drug.
Unfortunately, careful definition of selection criteria for matching participation in clinical trials has not been conventionally available. Vascular health, and more particularly cerebrovascular health, has been a criterion that has been difficult, if not impossible, to assess for possible clinical trial participants. Thus, there remains a need in the art for the ability to truly randomize clinical trials by choosing trial participants with matched vascular and cerebrovascular characteristics.
Moreover, an important aspect of clinical trials is to assess the risk of adverse effects of a given treatment. This can be difficult for adverse effects that manifest themselves only long after the short run of a clinical trial has run its course. Unfortunately, vascular effects, and more particularly cerebrovascular adverse effects, are difficult, if not impossible, to assess during the course of a clinical trial. Thus, there remains a need in the art for the ability to accurately assess adverse effects brought about by a treatment upon vascular and cerebrovascular health characteristics.
There is also needed a system and method for assessing the efficacy of a treatment, including conducting a procedure, carrying out a therapy, and administering a pharmaceutical substance or combinations thereof in treating vascular disorders, so that identification of deleterious treatments can be determined and no longer be prescribed.
Further, there is a need for a system and method for assessing the impact of a treatment, including conducting a procedure, carrying out a therapy, and administering a pharmaceutical substance, or combinations of pharmaceutical substances, upon vascular health, so that the impact of a treatment which have an effect upon vascular health can be ascertained.